Noah Webster

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Noah Webster (1758-1843), American lexicographer, remembered now almost solely as the compiler of a continuously successful dictionary, was for half a century among the more influential and most active literary men in the United States.

Noah Webster was born on Oct. 16, 1758, in West Hartford, Conn. In 1774 he entered Yale, sharing literary ambitions with his classmate Joel Barlow and tutor Timothy Dwight. His college years were interrupted by terms of military service. After his graduation in 1779, he taught school in Hartford, Litchfield, and Sharon, read widely, and studied law. He was admitted to the bar and received his master of arts degree in 1781. Dissatisfied with the British-made textbooks available for teaching, he determined to produce his own. He had, he said, "too much pride to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to learn our children."

Schoolmaster to America

Webster devised the first of his long series of American schoolbooks, a speller ponderously titled A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part I (1783). Known for generations simply as The Blue-back Speller, it was in use for more than a century and sold over 70 million copies. His book's effect on students is said to have been unparalleled in the history of American elementary education. Part II of the Grammatical Institute, a grammar, reprinted often under various titles, appeared in 1784. Part III, a reader, in the original 1785 edition included excerpts from yet-unpublished poetry by Dwight and Barlow. Though the reader had shorter life and more vigorous competition than other parts of the Institute, it set a patriotic and moralistic pattern followed by rival books, some of which were thought to attract attention because more religiously orientated. Webster stressed what he called the "art of reading" in later volumes, including two secularized versions of The New England Primer (1789, 1801), The Little Reader's Assistant (1790), The Elementary Primer (1831), and The Little Franklin (1836).

Copyright Reform

Webster toured the United States from Maine to Georgia selling his textbooks, convinced that "America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for arts as for arms, " but that to accomplish this she must protect by copyright the literary products of her countrymen. He pleaded so effectively that uniform copyright laws were early passed in most of the states, and it was largely through his continuing effort that Congress in 1831 passed a bill which ensured protection to writers. On his travels he also peddled his Sketches of American Policy (1785), a vigorous Federalist plea. In Philadelphia, where he paused briefly to teach school and see new editions of his Institute through the press, he published his politically effective An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787).

In New York, Webster established the American Magazine (1787-1788), which he hoped might become a national periodical. In it he pled for American intellectual independence, education for women, and adherence to Federalist ideas. Though it survived for only 12 monthly issues, it is remembered as one of the most lively, bravely adventuresome of early American periodicals. He continued as a political journalist with such pamphlets as The Effects of Slavery on Morals and Industry (1793), The Revolution in France (1794), and The Rights of Neutral Nations (1802).

Language Reform

But Webster's principal interest became language reform. As he set forth his ideas in Dissertations on the English Language (1789), theatre should be spelled theater; crumb, crumb; machine, masheen; plough, plow; draught, draft. For a time he put forward claims for such reform in his readers and spellers and in his Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (1790), which encouraged "reezoning, " "yung" persons, "reeding, " and a "zeel" for "lerning"; but he was too canny a Yankee always to allow eccentricity to stand in the way of profit. In The Prompter (1790) he quietly lectured his countrymen in corrective essays written plainly, in simple aphoristic style.

After his marriage in 1789, Webster practiced law in Hartford for 4 years before returning to New York to edit the city's first daily newspaper, the American Minerva (1793-1798). Tiring of the partisan controversy brought on by his forthright expression of Federalist opinion, he retired to New Haven to write A Brief History of Epidemic and Pestilential Diseases (1899) and to put together a volume of Miscellaneous Papers (1802).

The Dictionaries

From this time on, Webster gave most of his attention to preparing more schoolbooks, including A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language (1807). But he was principally concerned with compilation of A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806); its abridgment, A Dictionary … Compiled for the Use of Common Schools (1807, revised 1817); and finally, in two volumes, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). In range this last surpassed any dictionary of its time. A second edition, "corrected and enlarged" (1841), became known popularly as Webster's Unabridged. Conservative contemporaries, alarmed at its unorthodoxies in spelling, usage, and pronunciation and its proud inclusion of Americanisms, derided it as "Noah's Ark." However, after Webster's death the rights were sold in 1847 to George and Charles Merriam, printers in Worcester, Mass.; and the dictionary has become, through many revisions, the cornerstone and bulwark of effective American lexicography.

Webster's other late writings included A History of the United States (1832), a version of the Bible (1832) cleansed of all words and phrases dangerous to children or "offensive especially to females, " and a final Collection of Papers on Political, Literary and Moral Subjects (1843). Tall, redheaded, lanky, humorless, he was the butt of many cruel criticisms in his time. He died in New Haven on May 23, 1843.

Further Reading

Webster's Letters were edited by Harry R. Warfel (1953). Biographies include Emily E. (Ford) Skeel, Notes on the Life of Noah Webster (1912); Ervin C. Shoemaker, Noah Webster: Pioneer of Learning (1936); and Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America (1936). See also Robert K. Leavitt, Noah's Ark, New England Yankees, and the Endless Quest (1947), a history of the first century of Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

The first person to write a dictionary of American English and permanently alter the spelling of American English, Noah Webster through his spelling book taught millions of American children to read for the first half-century of the republic and millions more to spell for the following half-century.

Born a farmer's son in what is now West Hartford, Connecticut, Webster attended Yale College from 1774 to 1778, during the Revolutionary War. After graduating, he taught at Connecticut district schools before studying for the bar. The dismal conditions of these schools, combined with his patriotism and a search for self-identity, inspired him to compose three schoolbooks that, he believed, would unify the new nation through speaking and writing a common language. (Previously, almost all American schoolbooks had been reprints of imported British ones.) Part one of Webster's A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, a spelling book, was printed in 1783; part two, a grammar, in 1784; part three, a reader (a compilation of essays and poetry for children who could already read), in 1785. Webster then left on an eighteen-month tour south to promote his books and register them for state copyright, in the absence of national copyright legislation. In 1787 he revised the Grammatical Institute, retitling his speller the American Spelling Book and his reader An American Selection of Lessons.

He began editing periodicals in New York: the American Magazine for one year (1788 - 1789) and the pro-federalist American Minerva (1793 - 1798). Between the two came his marriage to Rebecca Greenleaf in 1789, the publication of various collections of essays, and an introduction to his reader, the Little Reader's Assistant (1790). In 1798 he retreated from politics and periodicals to New Haven and helped open a private school there.

After publishing a commercially unsuccessful history of epidemics, Webster began writing schoolbooks with renewed vigor, issuing the first three volumes of Elements of Useful Knowledge (1802 - 1806). He had obtained national copyright protection for his speller in 1790, when the first national copyright law was passed, a law that granted protection for fourteen-year periods. However, the income from his speller, for which he negotiated a penny a copy in 1804 (the date of his first copyright renewal), could not support his large family, and in 1812 he moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, to economize. He was instrumental there in founding Amherst Academy, now Amherst College. In 1816 Webster sold the entire rights to the American Spelling Book for its third copyright period, 1818 to 1832, to Hudson and Company of Hartford, Connecticut, in order to work solely on his major dictionary. In 1824, with his son William to aid him, he voyaged to Europe to complete it. Titled An American Dictionary of the English Language, it was published in New York in 1828. A year later, Webster produced the final revision of his speller, the Elementary Spelling Book, in conjunction with Aaron Ely, a New York educator. From then until his death in 1843 Webster issued several other schoolbooks and a bowdlerized edition of the Bible. The latter was the fruit of a conversion experience to fundamentalist Christianity in 1807.

Webster's Innovations

One of Webster's most important and lasting contributions to American English was to change, for the better, the spellings of certain groups of words from their British spelling. He used the principle of uniformity to justify his alterations, arguing that words that were alike, such as nouns and their derivatives, should be spelled alike. He therefore transformed words such as honour to honor (compare honorific), musick to music (compare musical) - the latter a change now adopted by the British - defence to defense (compare defensive) and centre to center. This last alteration actually violated his own principle - compare central - but brought centre and congruent words into conformity with numerous other words ending -er. Webster also respelled many anomalous British spellings, writing gaol as jail, and plough as plow. Earlier, in works such as the Little Reader's Assistant, Webster had gone much further with his reforms, with spellings such as yung and nabor. However, these had evoked so much ridicule that he soon abandoned them. His ability to introduce his major classes of spelling reform into his spellers and dictionaries was crucial to their success, as they became imprinted on the minds of each new generation.

Webster's second major contribution to American education was in the field of lexicography. Indeed, the word Webster is still virtually synonymous with dictionary. Although Webster issued a small stopgap dictionary, his Compendious Dictionary, in 1806, his masterpiece was his An American Dictionary of the English Language of 1828, a two-volume work of more than 70,000 entries and the first truly American dictionary. In it, Webster eliminated words that were not useful to Americans, such as words associated with coats of arms, and included those unique to the United States, like squash and skunk.

Webster was not equally successful in all aspects of his dictionary. By modern standards, his etymologies are flawed. His conversion to fundamentalist Christianity had led him to believe in one original language as the progenitor of all the rest, and his etymologies were compromised by his efforts to fit all words into this framework. On the other hand, he brought a new approach to definitions, which were more accurate, comprehensive, and logically organized than in any previous dictionary. His orthography has become standard American orthography. His indication of pronunciations by the use of diacritical marks was also innovative; lexicographers still use similar markings in the early twenty-first century.

Perfecting the Spelling Book for Reading Instruction

Important as Webster's lexicographical work was, his contributions to the spelling book tradition were even more significant. His spellers enjoyed vastly greater popularity than any other of his works. His original speller, the first part of the Institute (1783), sold out its first edition of 5,000 copies within a few months. By 1804 more than a million copies of its revision, the American Spelling Book of 1787, had been printed, most of them in Hartford and Boston. From 1804 to 1818 Webster's account books document the sales of licenses of another 3,223,000 copies. Between 1818 and 1832, the third copyright period, an estimated 3 million copies were printed. Even higher numbers are documented for Webster's completely revamped version, the Elementary Spelling Book of 1829, which he published in response to what he perceived as the slipping sales of the American Spelling Book under Hudson and Company. Between 1829, the Elementary's first publication, and 1843, the year of Webster's death, almost 3,868,000 copies were licensed for sale. Over all its editions, a conservative estimate puts the total sales of the speller at 70 million.

The national popularity and huge sales of Webster's spelling books can only be understood if it is appreciated that they were books designed primarily to teach children to read, and only secondarily to spell, through the alphabet method of reading instruction. The underlying assumption of all spelling books was that "reading" (defined as oral, not silent, reading) was a matter of pronouncing words, spelled aloud syllable by syllable, and that once a word was pronounced correctly, comprehension would follow. Webster's contribution to the spelling book tradition was to indicate how words should be pronounced. He introduced a system of numerical superscripts to indicate vowel pronunciation and altered the syllabification of words to their present format (si-ster now became sis-ter). In so doing, he improved significantly on his model and rival, A New Guide to the English Tongue (1740) by the British Thomas Dilworth. In his final revision, the Elementary of 1829, Webster replaced the superscripts with diacritical marks very similar to those he had used in his American Dictionary a year earlier - another innovation.

Other Works

A fourth contribution to education by Webster was to originate works that others would improve upon. He had a very large view of American education: He attempted to influence school content, "beginning with children & ending with men" (Monaghan, p. 69) who would progress from the Webster spelling book through other subjects up to the Webster dictionaries. Webster's grammar of 1784 was swiftly superseded by Lindley Murray's grammar, and his revised reader, An American Selection, was also overtaken, first by Caleb Bingham's American Preceptor and later by Murray's English Reader. (The latter would appear in some 350 editions by 1840.) Webster's school dictionaries, his four-volume Elements of Useful Knowledge (1802, 1804, 1806, 1812), his Biography, for the Use of Schools (1830), his History of the United States (1832), and his Manual of Useful Studies (1839) introduced many topics that would later evolve into school staples: geography and history of the United States and elsewhere and (in a primitive form in the fourth volume of the Elements) biology.

The "First" American Author

Webster was innovative in a fifth arena: he was the earliest American author to make a living from his own publications. He saw as a young man that there was money to be made from a schoolbook and sought protection for his first spelling book even before it was in print and before any state had yet passed laws protecting intellectual property. Webster has become known as the "father of copyright," and indeed he remained active in promoting copyright protection throughout his life. He might with more justice be termed the "father of royalties," as he was one of the first to exact payment from his publishers according to the number of books they printed or that he licensed to them.

Webster's ability to live from the proceeds of the spelling book was aided by another factor: his extraordinary promotion of his own books. He was the first, but certainly not the last, American author to involve himself deeply in the publishing and promotional aspects of his books. His activities prefigure almost all aspects of modern publishing. His first concern, particularly for part one of the Institute and later for the Elementary Spelling Book, was with the quality of the printed product. He monitored every printer himself, first across New England and then in the middle and southern states. He fussed over every internal detail of the product in an effort to make all his editions uniform across publishers: the spelling, the paper, the standing type. He revised and corrected each edition unceasingly.

His second concern was with promotion. No aspect of it escaped him. As was common practice at the time, he sought recommendations. (Both Benjamin Franklin and George Washington turned him down.) He went on promotional tours, as he did for the Institute in 1785. He gave lectures that brought him to the public's attention; he advertised the series and, when possible, planted "notices" (equivalent to press releases) in local newspapers; he donated his books to colleges and schools; he even gave portions of his proceeds to worthy causes. He was originally his own best agent, and used paid agents only late in his life. Above all, Webster kept an eye out for competitors and did not hesitate to launch stinging attacks, often in newspapers, on his rivals. In much of this, for better or worse, he foreshadowed modern practice.

The view of reading instruction incorporated in Webster's spellers - as systematic, sequential, letter-based, and learned by rote - would not be challenged until the 1820s. The charge brought against all spelling books hinged on the meaninglessness to the child of much of the spelling book's content. Reformers deplored the long lists of syllabified words that children had to encounter before they met sustained reading passages. By the late 1830s the success of the new-style readers, those like the Eclectic series originally authored by William Holmes McGuffey, were rendering spelling books obsolete as reading instructional texts.

Yet the sales of Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, now dubbed affectionately the "blue-back speller" or just "ole blue-back," continued to increase. By 1859, according to Appleton and Company of New York, the firm was printing the speller at the rate of a million and one-half copies per year. For the blue-back speller still had an educational role to play: It lived on for the rest of the century as a spelling instructional text and as the favorite arbiter at spelling bees in and out of school.

Bibliography

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. 1983. A Common Heritage: Noah Webster's Blue-Back Speller. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.

Rollins, Richard M. 1980. The Long Journey of Noah Webster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Rollins, Richard M., ed. 1989. The Autobiographies of Noah Webster: From the Letters and Essays, Memoir, and Diary. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Skeel, Emily Ellsworth Ford. 1971. A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster (1958), ed. Edwin H. Carpenter Jr. New York: New York Public Library and Arno.

Warfel, Harry R., ed. 1953. The Letters of Noah Webster. New York: Library.

Warfel, Harry R. 1966. Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America. New York: Octagon.

Webster, Noah. 1783. A Grammatical Institute of the English Language …, Part I. Hartford, CT: Hudson and Goodwin.

Webster, Noah. 1787a. An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking, Calculated to Improve the Minds and Refine the Taste of Youth …, 3rd edition. Philadelphia: Young and M'Cullough.

Webster, Noah. 1787b. The American Spelling Book Containing, an Easy Standard of Pronunciation. Being the First Part of a Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Philadelphia: Young and M'Cullough.

Webster, Noah. 1790. The Little Reader's Assistant …. Hartford, CT: Elisha Babcock.

Webster, Noah, to Samuel L. Mitchell, June 29, 1807.

Webster, Noah. 1828. An American Dictionary of the English Language …, 2 vols. New York: S[herman] Converse.

Webster, Noah. 1829. The Elementary Spelling Book; Being an Improvement on the American Spelling Book. Middletown, CT: Niles.

— E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN

An educator and author of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, best known for his American Dictionary of the English Language and Blue-Backed Speller. He worked for the establishment of a distinctive American version of the English language; for example, he insisted on spellings such as wagon, center, and honor in place of the standard British waggon, centre, and honour.

Quotes:

"Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground."

Noah Webster

Noah Webster (October 16, 1758 – May 28, 1843) was an American lexicographer, textbook author, spelling reformer, word enthusiast, and editor. He has been called the “Father of American Scholarship and Education.” His “Blue-Backed Speller” books were used to teach spelling and reading to five generations of American children. In the United States, his name has become synonymous with dictionaries, especially the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary that was first published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Speller and dictionary 3 Religious views 4 References 4.1 Primary sources 5 External links

Biography

Noah Webster's adult home, where he raised his family and wrote many publications including An American Dictionary of the English Language. Built in 1823 in New Haven, Connecticut. Removed to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford, Connecticut, to a family who had lived in Connecticut since colonial days. His father, Noah, Sr. (1722-1813), was a farmer and a sower. His father was a descendant of Connecticut Governor John Webster (governor); his mother, Mercy (born Steele; d. 1794), was a descendant of Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony. Noah had two brothers, Abraham (1751-1831) and Charles (b. 1762).

At the age of 16, Noah began attending Yale College. His four years at Yale overlapped the American Revolutionary War, and, because of food shortages, many of his college classes were held in Glastonbury, Connecticut. During the American Revolution, he served in the Connecticut Militia.

Having graduated from Yale in 1778, Webster wanted to continue his education in order to earn his law degree. He taught school in Glastonbury, Hartford, and West Hartford in order to pay for his education. He earned his law degree in 1781, but did not practice law until 1789. He found the law not to his liking, so he tried teaching, setting up several very small schools that did not thrive.

Webster married Rebecca Greenleaf (1766-1847) on October 26, 1789, in New Haven, Connecticut. They had eight children:

• Emily Schotten (1790-1861), who married William W. Ellsworth, named by Webster as an executor of his will.^[1] Emily, their daughter, married Rev. Abner Jackson, who became president of both Hartford's Trinity College and Hobart College in New York State.^[2]
• Frances Julianna (1793-1869)
• Harriet (1797-1844)
• Mary (1799-1819)
• William Greenleaf (1801-1869)
• Eliza (1803-1888)
• Henry (1806-1807)
• Louisa (b. 1808)

Webster liked to carry raisins and candies in his pocket for his children to enjoy.

Webster married well and had joined the elite in Hartford but did not have much money. In 1793, Alexander Hamilton loaned him $1500 to move to New York City to edit a Federalist newspaper. In December, he founded New York's first daily newspaper, American Minerva (later known as The Commercial Advertiser), and edited it for four years.

For decades, he was one of the most prolific authors in the new nation, publishing textbooks, political essays for his Federalist party, and newspaper articles at a remarkable rate (a modern bibliography of his published works required 655 pages).

The Websters moved back to New Haven in 1798. He then served in the Connecticut House of Representatives in 1800 and 1802-1807. He is buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.

Politician Daniel Webster was Noah Webster’s cousin. As a senator, Daniel sponsored Noah’s proposed copyright bill.^[3] The first major statutory revision of U.S. copyright law, the 1831 Act was a result of intensive lobbying by Noah Webster and his agents in Congress.^[4]

Speller and dictionary

A 1932 statue of Webster by Korczak Ziółkowski stands in front of the public library of West Hartford, Connecticut.

As a teacher, he had come to dislike American elementary schools. They could be overcrowded, with up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses, poorly staffed with untrained teachers, and poorly equipped with no desks and unsatisfactory textbooks that came from England. Webster thought that Americans should learn from American books, so he began writing a three volume compendium, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The work consisted of a speller (published in 1783), a grammar (published in 1784), and a reader (published in 1785). His goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children. His most important improvement, he claimed, was to rescue "our native tongue" from "the clamour^[5] of pedantry" that surrounded English grammar and pronunciation. He complained that the English language had been corrupted by the British aristocracy, which set its own standard for proper spelling and pronunciation. Webster rejected the notion that the study of Greek and Latin must precede the study of English grammar. The appropriate standard for the American language, argued Webster, was, "the same republican principles as American civil and ecclesiastical constitutions", which meant that the people-at-large must control the language; popular sovereignty in government must be accompanied by popular usage in language.

The Speller was arranged so that it could be easily taught to students, and it progressed by age. From his own experiences as a teacher, Webster thought the Speller should be simple and gave an orderly presentation of words and the rules of spelling and pronunciation. He believed students learned most readily when he broke a complex problem into its component parts and had each pupil master one part before moving to the next. Ellis argues that Webster anticipated some of the insights currently associated with Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development. Webster said that children pass through distinctive learning phases in which they master increasingly complex or abstract tasks. Therefore, teachers must not try to teach a three-year-old how to read; they could not do it until age five. He organized his speller accordingly, beginning with the alphabet and moving systematically through the different sounds of vowels and consonants, then syllables, then simple words, then more complex words, then sentences.^[6]

The speller was originally titled The First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Over the course of 385 editions in his lifetime, the title was changed in 1786 to The American Spelling Book, and again in 1829 to The Elementary Spelling Book. Most people called it the "Blue-Backed Speller" because of its blue cover, and for the next one hundred years, Webster's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time; by 1861, it was selling a million copies per year, and its royalty of less than one cent per copy was enough to sustain Webster in his other endeavors. Some consider it to be the first dictionary created in the United States, and it helped create the popular contests known as spelling bees.

Slowly, he changed the spelling of words, such that they became "Americanized." He chose s over c in words like defense, he changed the re to er in words like center, he dropped one of the Ls in traveler, and at first he kept the u in words like colour or favour but dropped it in later editions. He also changed "tongue" to "tung."

Unauthorized printing of his books, and disparate copyright laws that varied among the thirteen states, led Webster to champion the federal copyright law that was successfully passed in 1790.

In 1806, Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. The following year, at the age of 43, Webster began writing an expanded and comprehensive dictionary, An American Dictionary of the English Language, which would take twenty-seven years to complete. To supplement the documentation of the etymology of the words, Webster learned twenty-six languages, including Old English (Anglo-Saxon), German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced, and used words differently.

During the course of his work on the book, the family moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1812, where Webster helped to found Amherst College. In 1822, the family moved back to New Haven, and Webster was awarded an honorary degree from Yale the following year.

Webster completed his dictionary during his year abroad in 1825 in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge. His book contained seventy thousand words, of which twelve thousand had never appeared in a published dictionary before. As a spelling reformer, Webster believed that English spelling rules were unnecessarily complex, so his dictionary introduced American English spellings, replacing "colour" with "color", substituting "wagon" for "waggon", and printing "center" instead of "centre". He also added American words, like "skunk" and "squash", that did not appear in British dictionaries. At the age of seventy, Webster published his dictionary in 1828.

Though it now has an honored place in the history of American English, Webster's first dictionary only sold 2,500 copies. He was forced to mortgage his home to bring out a second edition, and his life from then on was plagued with debt.

In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. On May 28, 1843, a few days after he had completed revising an appendix to the second edition, and with much of his efforts with the dictionary still unrecognized, Noah Webster died.

Religious views

Webster was a devout Christian. His speller was grounded in Scripture, and his first lesson began "Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink ; nor for your body, what ye shall put on ; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things."

His 1828 American Dictionary contained the greatest number of Biblical definitions given in any reference volume. Webster considered education "useless without the Bible". Webster claimed to have learned 20 different languages in finding definitions for which a particular word is used. From the preface to the 1828 edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language:

In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed... . No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

Webster released his own edition of the Bible in 1833, called the Common Version. He used the King James Version (KJV) as a base and consulted the Hebrew and Greek along with various other versions and commentaries. Webster molded the KJV to correct grammar, replaced words that were no longer used, and did away with words and phrases that could be seen as offensive.

All editions of Webster's Dictionary published in 1913 and earlier, along with the Webster Bible and Dissertation on the English Language are available in the public domain.

References

Webster's grave at the Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut

1. ^ Noah Webster and the American Dictionary, David Micklethwait, McFarland, 2005
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ "An Exhibit Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of Noah Webster’s Birth, October 16, 1758". Amherst College.. https://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/exhibitions/webster. Retrieved 2008-07-18. 
4. ^ Copyright Act (1831), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer
5. ^ Citing this article, "at first he kept the u in words like colour or favour" so this quote should have a 'U' in clamour
6. ^ Ellis 174.

• Joseph J. Ellis; After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture 1979. chapter 6, interpretive essay
• David Micklethwait. Noah Webster and the American Dictionary (2005)
• John S. Morgan. Noah Webster (1975), popular biography
• C. Louise Nelson; "Neglect of Economic Education in Webster's 'Blue-Backed Speller'" American Economist, Vol. 39, 1995
• Richard Rollins. The Long Journey of Noah Webster (1980) (ISBN 0-8122-7778-3)
• Harlow Giles Unger. Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot (1998), scholarly biography
• Harry R. Warfel, Noah Webster: Schoolmaster to America (1936), standard biography
• Lepore, J. (2006, November 6). Noah's Mark: Webster and the original dictionary wars.The New Yorker, 78-87.

Primary sources

• Homer D. Babbidge, Jr., ed., Noah Webster: On Being American (1967), selections from his writings
• Harry R. Warfel, ed., Letters of Noah Webster (1953),
• Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: Containing the Rudiments of the English Language for the Use of Schools in the United States by Noah Webster (1999 reprint)
• John F. Ohles. "Biographical Dictionary of American Educators", Vol. 3 1978, pp 1363-1364

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Noah Webster

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Noah Webster

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Noah Webster

• Works by Noah Webster at Project Gutenberg
• The Noah Webster House & West Hartford Historical Society
• Noah Webster Collection, Special Collections, Jones Library, Amherst MA
• Noah Webster on the Merriam-Webster website
• Connecticut Heritage website
• Biographical entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
• Searchable Webster's 1828 dictionary and Searchable Webster's 1913 dictionary - both in the public domain.
• Searchable Webster's 1828 dictionary
• Searchable Webster's 1828 wildcard dictionary
• Webster Bible text
• Preface to the Webster Bible
• Downloadable PDF of the Webster Bible
• A proposal for spelling reform from his younger and more radical days
• Online Webster Bible Searchable by verse and keywords
• The American Spelling Book
• Commentary of a Speech by Noah Webster on July 4, 1802

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